Protectionism or Restraint of Trade

The EU leaders have a bit of a nerve complaining about the Buy American aspects of the Obama stimulus package considering what is happening in Europe. From The Local Germany's News in English: I was already thinking of taking advantage of the massive discounts on cars to trade my 1996 Opel for something a little more trustworthy and am now enticed by this €2,500 bonus the government is offering for new cars. But I’m a little wary of German bureaucracy – is it truly good deal and if so, how do I get it? Scott Shubert, Heidelberg. As part of its efforts to battle the global economic slowdown, the German government recently enacted two economic stimulus packages, the second of which includes a €2,500 “environmental bonus” for anyone trading in their old car for a new one. The programme is designed to encourage used car buyers to add their old polluting jalopy to the scrap heap before driving into the sunset on a new, cleaner-burning steed. The government hopes the subsidy will stem if not reverse a 14 percent decline in new car sales in January, thereby supporting Germany’s most important employer – the car industry reportedly allows one in five Germans to bring home the bacon. Your fear of Teutonic bureaucracy is understandable, but the procedure is relatively easy – if paper-intensive – for German standards. First off, the car you want to jettison must be over nine years old and you must be recorded in the car’s registration as the owner for at least the past year. If this is the case, then you first need to download the subsidy application from the website of the Federal Office for Economy and Export Control (www.bafa.de) and then take your old car to a certified scrap yard (listed under www.altfahrzeugstelle.de). The junkyard will give you proof that you gave up the car as well as sign your application that it will feed your car to a shredding machine and recycle it, rather than sell it on to Eastern Europe or Africa. You then pick out either a shiny new vehicle or what’s known as a Jahreswagen, a car that’s been driven by an employee of the manufacturer for less than a year. Take the registration papers for the new car as well as the title and registration (Fahrzeugschein and Fahrzeugbrief or Zulassungsbescheinigung Teil I and II) of your old car to the department of motor vehicles (Zulassungsstelle). They will both note the scrapping of your old car in its papers and give you new registration papers for your new car. And with that you’re almost €2,500 richer. ================= Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, writing in the Daily Telegraph:

Spain is losing jobs at three times the rate of the US, in proportionate terms. Over one million Spanish men under thirty are unemployed, leading to a surge in applications to join the armed forces. Three quarters of the army candidates are being turned away.

Industry minister Miguel Sebastian has launched a "Made in Spain" drive, exhorting the nation to buy Spanish clothes and to take ski holidays in the Sierra Nevada instead of the Alps. He claimed that 120,000 jobs can be saved if every citizen spends €150 less this year on imports.

The campaign amounts to a partial boycott of foreign products and may breach EU law. It is the sort of protectionist reflex becoming visible daily in much of the world.

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